Breed History

The Polish Hunting Spaniel was not invented in the late twentieth century. Dogs of this type worked in Poland and its former eastern territories for decades before the breed was recognised, shaped by local hunting, terrain and the demands of the job. Recognition came later and formalised a type that already existed.

The type is easier to place against the older history of spaniels. Before modern breeds were separated and standardised, spaniels were understood through the work they did and grouped by task and terrain. Writing in 1922, Robert Leighton noted that the sporting spaniels had "at a very early date" been divided into land and water spaniels, each bred for its own ground. Dogs working dense cover could be light and short in the leg; dogs working marsh, bog and open water needed more leg for unstable ground, a stronger build for cold and fatigue, and a coat that shed water and dried quickly.

That water-spaniel type was once a documented working dog. The English Water Spaniel, described in the late nineteenth century as a medium-sized dog with legs considerably longer than a field spaniel's and a dense, water-resistant coat, flushed and retrieved across wet ground before it fell out of use. As British shooting became more organised and specialised, retrieving passed to specialist retrievers and land spaniels concentrated on flushing, and by the early twentieth century the English Water Spaniel was effectively extinct. It had not failed at its work; hunting culture had moved on.

The conditions that produced that kind of dog did not disappear everywhere. In the eastern regions of what was then Poland, particularly the borderland wetlands of Polesie, hunting continued in the same kind of landscape that had once sustained water spaniels in Britain. Marsh, reed bed, forest edge and waterlogged meadow were the ordinary terrain, and the dogs that worked them needed stamina, cold tolerance and the sense to move through unstable ground. Spaniels there were valued for their working ability rather than their pedigree, and estates such as those of the Radziwiłł and Koziełł-Poklewski families kept and exchanged them within hunting networks. The resemblance to the older British type is not evidence of shared ancestry but of similar terrain making similar demands: dogs shaped by those demands tend to share the same moderate size, longer leg, weather-resistant coat and steady temperament.

The type persisted through use. Numbers were small, closed lines were impractical, and hunters bred from dogs that had proved themselves in the field, crossing in Springers, Cockers, Sussex and the occasional French spaniel. Dogs were judged over seasons of real work, and those that could not sustain it dropped out of breeding. A consistent type emerged without anyone setting out to fix a standard.

The Second World War broke that continuity. Borders moved, the eastern borderlands passed to the Soviet Union, populations were displaced, and much of the rural hunting culture was lost with the networks that had sustained it. What survived did so in scattered rural hands, kept by hunters and foresters who went on using these dogs because they worked. By the 1970s and 1980s dogs of the type still existed, with no club, no registry and no written standard, unremarkable to anyone but the people who worked them.

Turning a surviving type into a breed owed a great deal to one person's unusual background. Andrzej Krzywiński was a conservation biologist whose career centred on wildlife reintroduction, population genetics and the reproductive biology of threatened species. Travelling in the eastern borderlands in the early 1980s, he came across working spaniels that resembled the old Polish type, and he watched them over years before deciding to gather and stabilise them. He approached the dogs as he had approached wild species, thinking at the level of populations, and treated the task as recovering a type that already existed rather than designing a new one.

The place where the foundation dogs lived left its mark on the breed's temperament. At the Kadzidłowo wildlife park the dogs shared a working research reserve with hand-reared deer, orphaned lynx and wolf pups, and lived in the family home alongside all of it. They had to work with focus when work was needed, tracking wounded game across difficult ground, and settle calmly around wildlife and children the rest of the time. That combination, and the calm maternal competence needed to raise litters with little intervention, was selected for by the setting itself, and it is still recognisable in the breed.

The foundation bitch was Pestka, a brown roan from a working spaniel called Dina whose balance, biddability and love of water had caught Krzywiński's attention. Pestka's brown roan coat and white tail tip, rare in her own litter, later became characteristic of the breed. Her first litter, in 1993, was sired by Feniks, an accomplished working Springer Spaniel, and two of its females stayed on as foundation stock. What followed was slow work: gathering breeding dogs, letting traits prove themselves over time, and keeping the fit between the dogs and the job they were meant to do.

Formal recognition followed later, driven by others who saw the value in what had been gathered. The Polish Kennel Club granted provisional recognition in 2016, FCI recognition has followed in several jurisdictions, and the breed continues to expand across northern and central Europe under organised health and pedigree oversight, with outcrossing used sparingly under club guidance and steady attention to inbreeding and genetic diversity. The community is now working towards full FCI recognition.

On full FCI recognition the Polish Hunting Spaniel would join Group 8, the retrievers, flushing dogs and water dogs, as the tenth flushing breed. It is already recognised by kennel clubs across much of northern and central Europe, and well over a thousand dogs have been registered since 2017.